In this thesis, I explore and challenge the devaluation of mother-work (defined as the unpaid,
domestic activities involved in child rearing) in New Labour social policy discourse, looking
specifically at the ' Sure Start' programme. This project is rooted in Luce Irigaray's
deconstructive psychoanalytic feminism/feminist philosophy but employs NVivo, a
'positivistic' computer aided qualitative data analysis software programme to structure a
feminist critical discourse analysis of Sure Start policy documents. Harnessing the productive
tension arising from these seemingly alien bodies of knowledge, I locate and undermine the
devaluation of mother-work within the policy texts.
I first trace Irigaray's development of the critique of phallogocentricism which she reaches
through a feminist engagement with, and reformulation of, dominant western philosophical
and psychoanalytic theories. I then expand and elaborate upon this critique, drawing out and
developing the tropes of Matricide and the Sacrificial Economy. These tropes, I argue, are
mechanisms that sustain the phallogocentric organisation of western culture.
After considering the epistemological puzzles which arise from pairing Irigaray's theory with
my methodological tool of Nvivo, the project culminates in a feminist critical discourse
analysis of Sure Start documents. I use NVivo to highlight the silences, slips, occlusions and
conflations that occur in Sure Start documents which construct phallogocentric, but socially
and politically meaningful messages about mother-work and paid employment. This method
allows me to detail where Sure Start documents use the phallogocentric mechanisms of
Matricide and the Sacrificial Economy, split into down into 'mother node', 'father node' and
'parent node' to reinscribe the ideological notion of the intrinsic worth of paid employment
and the devaluation of mother-work, thinking this valuation to the phallogocentric fear of the
maternal body and of relationality.